Real estate marketing is a competitive industry. Agencies and individual sales agents go to great lengths to promote their services. It is not uncommon to see billboards, bus stops, brochures, television advertisement and the like campaigning for business. With this virtual flood of advertising, agencies are pressed to find new ways to establish relationships with new customers.
A productive, but not necessarily efficient, means of establishing customer relationships includes providing information specifically targeted at a potential customer based on the customer's personal information. For example, local sales information is typically available as a public record in the local tax collector's office. An industrious real estate agent might periodically cross-reference such records against an array of prospective customers and send them the results of the search. Providing this type of targeted information is generally well received by the prospective customer as relevant and of personal interest because for most customers, the personal dollars spent to purchase and maintain their home often represents the largest single investment in their lifetime. Even if the prospective customer is not in an immediate position for the real estate agent's services, goodwill and name recognition is achieved in the process that may be tapped at a later time. However, in order to properly research and prepare such correspondence, the real estate agent must expend considerable time and effort unrelated to showing property, closing deals and other important activities.
Because communication of recent property sales to owners in a neighborhood has traditionally represented an inefficient, but effective means of generating future leads and customer contacts, it is not an uncommon practice for this to be done by aggressive and hard-working real estate agents. However, it is also known in the industry that most real estate agents are not as aggressive in their prospecting work as they need to be to continually bring in a source of leads, and the agents that do make the time and dollar commitment to write, print, stuff, and mail periodic neighborhood property value letters do not continue after a time because they get too busy (with the leads that are generated from prior mailings) to keep it going.
What is needed is an automated method of searching, identifying and transmitting relevant property sales transactions to a prospective customer without the overhead of traditional methods. The use of computer networks, databases and document generation for the integration of such automated method is far from obvious.
Therefore, an object of this invention is to provide a method of automating the periodic communication of useful information to a potential real estate customer based on recent sales transactions.
However, in view of the prior art in at the time the present invention was made, it was not obvious to those of ordinary skill in the pertinent art how the identified needs could be fulfilled.